Jon Couture: Ortiz continues to defy odds

Sunday

Jul 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

"A younger and cheaper version of Brian Daubach." That's where this started. The epic poem of David Ortiz. The fundamental core of pro baseball in New England for nearly a decade. The path that will lead to a '34' on the right-field facade, regardless of whether it also forks toward Cooperstown.

JON COUTURE

"A younger and cheaper version of Brian Daubach."

That's where this started. The epic poem of David Ortiz. The fundamental core of pro baseball in New England for nearly a decade. The path that will lead to a '34' on the right-field facade, regardless of whether it also forks toward Cooperstown.

Of course, Theo Epstein didn't say that chortle-inducer up there. The GM, in announcing the Ortiz signing in January 2003, said "all the scouts think he has a very high ceiling. You're looking at a player with the potential to be a middle-of-the-lineup bat in the big leagues."

He couldn't have known. Not all of this. Epstein's good, but he didn't think he'd be getting a guy that was miles from that Brian Daubach quotable, written during the team's courtship by a highly regarded beat guy not prone to hyperbole.

From Jeremy Giambi and Shea Hillenbrand to nine figures in career earnings, 500 doubles, the hit record for a DH and everything else. You know the backstory. The accolades are mostly PR fluff; Ortiz will likely get to 2,000 hits in September, but even he understands what his record-breaking totals mean.

At least it gives us a chance to take stock. And there's plenty to absorb.

In the first three games of that Mariners series, with Boston's pitching reeling, with the West Coast trip dangerously close to calamity, Ortiz went 8-for-10. He twice rifled inner-half fastballs, down in the zone, into the seats. Three of the other hits were doubles. In the finale, he walked twice and scored twice.

He certainly got help throughout the lineup, but it was a vintage Ortiz performance. Perhaps the biggest surprise was his playing in Thursday's day game, which would have seemed a spot to rest his balky heels.

A concession to age. An understanding this won't last forever, even if there are brief moments where you'd be forgiven for forgetting.

Ortiz still does, though, and produces in kind. He's got 300 OPS (on-base plus slugging) points on Martinez this season. Nearly 250 on Kansas City's Billy Butler, already making $8 million years before his 30th birthday.

Big Papi will be his benchmark, as the Red Sox are to his annually moribund Royals.

In Ortiz, we see this franchise in full. Pedro Martinez was gone after 2004. Dustin Pedroia was barely here before 2007. Jason Varitek and Tim Wakefield, important as they were, were bit players. He was a driving force for both; the walk-off king of the Curse-breakers, and a .350-hitting terror with Manny in the latter crown.

Yet it goes beyond that. The speech after April's Marathon tragedy, speaking with the emotion of the genuine Bostonian he's become. The face of so many charitable endeavors. But also as imperfect as the team has been. Maybe all the ground balls not run out stick in your craw. Maybe the sailor's vocabulary, which makes basically all my behind-the-scenes clubhouse stories involving him unprintable. Maybe the strange interruption of a Terry Francona presser in 2011 over a missing RBI (which, trust me, was authentic rage.)

Maybe something more sinister.

Let's leave it at this. David Ortiz, playing his 17th MLB season, has lived the ballplayer's life. In ways we can imagine, in ways we can't, and in ways we don't want to. Whatever it means, whatever it implies.

What matters to us, those on the outside, is the enjoyment. And there has been plenty.

In regions awash with success and championships like this, if any region has truly had a run like this, sometimes we can miss the details. The Patriots, title drought be damned, have won three of every four games they've played since the start of the 2001 season. The Celtics and Bruins have been annual contenders since the end of the last decade. The Red Sox? Outside of last season, no different.

He has seen it all. He has lived it all. Greatness, even to the most aware, has a way of sneaking up on you. If you're not a big Celtics fan, maybe one day you looked up and noticed Paul Pierce was in Year 15 of a career we'll never forget. Maybe it took Patrice Bergeron's critical goals during this latest playoff run to make you realize just what he's meant in his nine seasons — seasons that have earned him eight more.

"It would be a good fit," Fernando Cuza, Ortiz's agent then and now, said back in 2003 to the Globe. "He would do some damage at Fenway Park, and he would be great in the clubhouse."

There are dozens of different memories that come to mind with Ortiz. For me, strangely, it all comes back to a photo at the end of that 2003 season. In the gloaming of the Game 7 loss to the Yankees, a group of Red Sox were captured around a couch in the visitors' clubhouse. None had even so much as taken their uniforms off yet; Ortiz sat with a hand in his face on the floor, his cleats strewn out of frame.

He'd slammed what should have been the putaway homer in the eighth inning that night. He followed with a double in the 10th. It didn't matter. It likewise didn't matter when the Sox dismissed Grady Little, the manager whom his play has won over.

Seventeen walk-off hits awaited him in the next decade. Nine All-Star berths. Some 1,500 hits. Legendary stuff. Genuinely iconic stuff. It didn't matter then. He was despondent, just like so many. He couldn't believe it had slipped through his finger.

We couldn't have known what was in store for him. What was in store for us.

That's the thing about greatness. Sometimes, you never see it coming.

Jon Couture covers the Red Sox for The Standard-Times. Contact him at jon.couture@bostonherald.com, or through 'Better Red Than Dead' at Blogs.SouthCoastToday.com/red-sox